Programming Languages

Friday 24 May 2013.

I have created 2 complete programming languages. One of which was download over 100k times.

XST BASIC

A long time ago when I first came to the PC after using STOS (Atari ST) then AMOS (Amiga) I noticed a distinct lack of any language similair to STOS/AMOS. This put me into a world where I had to learn C and Assembler.
While playing about writing simple games I had the idea how much quicker it would be to write games if I first made my own AMOS style language for the PC -and then any games I did write would serve as an advertisment for the language!
This project evolved over the years and became quite a popular language, many times the website vanished because it had exceeded it's allocated bandwidth and it was even used in a school in Russia. Overall over 100,000 downloads (and even now long after development has stopped its still getting a few downloads every month).

Although it had only simple 3d capabilities it was able to produce a Doom clone without much effort. Bear in mind there was no direct3d or similair available in those days, this was made using good old maths cos/sin.

 


That was back in the days of DOS. Although not as popular I later made a windows version.
This version used the irrlicht 3d library. This made the resulting games much more impressive (and I didnt need worry about so much maths!).

 

APX BASIC

With all the interest in mobile gaming I installed Java to write my own. Installing Java was a pain and swallowed so much hard disk space so I searched from a simple language (AMOS/STOS like ofcourse) to write games for my mobile without all the java baggage. I failed to find anything suitable so I thought, I couldn't write another language, could I?

...The initial language didnt take long to write as it was a simple p-code compiler and I had much experience writing these.

  

Programs ran nice on the pc but interpreting p-code was slow on the mobile so the fun process of researching java byte code compiling and optimising began. Ultimately this lead to me creating a compiler that could convert my language into java byte code (j2me) that would run as fast as any program written and compiled in java without installing java.
This project took 2 years (part time), during this time the iPhone took over and alas as java didnt run on it this language was kinda redundant.
And then I thought, I couldn't write another language...Could I?